Irons Mines A New Vein
by Brian D. Johnson, Maclean's
April 11, 1994
Jeremy Irons transforms himself one more time
He does not look like a movie star. He doesn't even look much like Jeremy Irons. Drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in a Manhattan hotel room, Irons looks gaunt and grey, almost vampirish. He has dark-circled eyes and hollow cheeks. A new beard darkens the boyish delicacy of his features. He explains that he had grown it to play a Bosnian refugee in a one-hour stage play mounted near his home in Oxfordshire, England. "I wanted to scruff up," he said. "I sort of don't like having it, but people keep telling me, "You look great in a beard," so I thought, I'll keep it on for a while longer."
Jeremy Irons has been messing with his image lately. He is known for playing refined, intelligent and morally ambiguous men. They include charming predators, such as the twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers and the sinister Claus yon Bulow in Reversal of Fortune. Then there are the single-minded romantics, from the dangerously obsessed adulterer in Damage to the gender-blind diplomat who woos a Peking opera star in M. Butterfly. But now, in The House of the Spirits, based on the epic novel by Chilean-born author Isabel Allende, Irons has transformed himself into someone completely different, a cruel and brutish Latin American patriarch named Esteban Trueba.
As Trueba, the 45-year-old actor has gone out of his way to hide his distinguishing marks. Replacing his luxuriant Oxford diction with a vaguely American accent, he delivers his lines in a clipped cadence, through prosthetic teeth that produce a kind of speech impediment. "I wanted to make Esteban's face less effete than mine," Irons explains. "I wanted him to have a prouder mouth, and not to have good teeth. So we desigued different teeth, which change as I get older. That had the effect of giving me a thicker voice." The gimmick recalls what Marlon Brando (in The Godfather) and Jack Nicholson (in Prizzi's Honor) did by padding their upper lips -- in this case, the results are arguably less felicitous.
Irons's makeover in The House of the Spirits, however, is more than cosmetic. His characters usually display seductive depths of complicity; they always seem to know more than they let on. But Trueba's inner life is clamped shut, sealed off by bitterness and machismo. "That's what attracted me to him," says Irons. "He was so different from those men I've been playing. In the middle of M. Butterfly, I thought, "What am I doing this for? I've been here. I'm treading over old ground." "Then, he adds: "When I read House of the Spirits, I thought, 'Yes, this is like a breath of fresh air, this character.' He's a man who acts without thinking, who is not in touch with his emotions. And when they come out, they come out violently, because they are repressed."
A self-made man who starts out as a miner, Trueba takes over an abandoned estate and becomes a powerful landowner. In a story spanning four decades, he disowns an illegitimate son, abuses his sister (Glenn Close), mistreats his wife (Meryl Streep) and tries to kill the man (Antonio Banderas) who loves his daughter (Winona Ryder). By the end, his redemption is long overdue.
Although the actor has played more than his share of unsavory leading men, his own life seems well adjusted. The son of a chartered accountant, he grew up in a seaside village on the Isle of Wight and rose through the ranks of theatre into the Royal Shakespeare Company. "I think the fact that I was brought up through theatre," he says, "means that I'm used to putting myself into quite different situations from the ones I know about." American movie actors without stage experience, he adds, "tend to have problems if they are playing people who are outside their ken."
Streep and Close, his American co-stars in The House of Spirits, are both stage veterans. Streep, who played opposite Irons in The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981, has remained a friend. "Because we have families much the same age, when we are in Los Angeles we tend to be in touch," says Irons, who has two sons, aged 8 and 15, with his wife, actress Sinead Cusack. Irons and Close, meanwhile, played man and wife on Broadway in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (1984) -- both won Tonys -- and they acted out a poisoned marriage in Reversal of Fortune (1990), for which Irons won his Oscar.
But Irons gives Canadian director David Cronenberg some of the credit for that Oscar. There was a widespread feeling in Hollywood that the actor had been robbed the previous year, when the Academy failed to nominate his extraordinary performance in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988). But his second film with Cronenberg, last year's M. Butterfly, was a critical and commercial flop, and Irons now claims that he had doubts about the script from the beginning. "I think the problems were multifarious," he says. "Is that a good word -- multifarious? What's the difference between many and multifarious? Anyway, the problems were many."
The actor recalls expressing his reservations to Cronenberg. "But we felt we wouldn't get the film made unless we went with it then. I thought, "David, you can make it work, I trust you." I made a mistake. I should have said, 'Let's wait." "When Maclean's relayed the actor's comments to Cronenberg last week, the director said: "I have no idea what he's talking about. Other than discussing little knots in certain scenes, we never said there was anything wrong with the script. And on this of all movies, I was under no pressure." On the set, however, Irons did express doubts about his career, Cronenberg recalled. "I think he felt he was doomed to constant repetition, that he'd done everything he could do. But Jeremy's a wonderful actor, and he hasn't even come close to exploring his limits."
Irons, who has also been harshly critical of Damage, admits that his concerns as an actor go beyond his role. "With me, it's always been the story that we have to get right. So I go into a film with that attitude, which sometimes amazes directors and sometimes unnerves them."
At this point, the publicist in charge of the actor's schedule walks into the room and says: "I have to cut this off."
"That's terribly rude," says Irons. "I think 'm the one who says when we cut it off. We're having a very interesting conversation -- unless someone has a train to catch?"
Finishing the interview at his leisure, Irons talks about his interest in directing. "Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is," he says, "because I have more and more ideas, and I get tougher and tougher on directors." One question remains: a year from now, will he be finding fault with The House of the Spirits? "I am totally happy with it -- I'm hugely happy with it," he says, as his face finally brightens with a movie-star smile.